Smart Devices — what runs in the house

Projects Tracker · Smart Devices · track 3 of 5 ← ReMapping 5G Systems →

in progress The home-automation work. The services run on the Pi; the documentation lives in the engine folder Smart Devices/, one folder per device — and that folder reports itself here, walked live on every page load:

The code on the Pi is the source of truth. There is no Mac copy of ~/smart-home/hue-iris/app.py — edit it on the Pi and restart hue-iris.service. Those pages document; they do not deploy.

What is running

Device	Stack	Where it runs	Documentation	State
Hue Iris Philips Hue Iris floor lamp, paired straight to a Zigbee dongle - no Hue Bridge	Zigbee → Zigbee2MQTT → MQTT → Python	Pi · hramiyar `hue-iris.service` · port 8091 `~/smart-home/hue-iris/app.py`	10 sections, 5,472 words, 2 figures, 2 images	running

Walked live at page load — in step with Smart Devices/status.json.

The next step

Continue the smart-device projects already running on the Pi.
Work through the protocol stack below, one standard at a time.

The protocol stack

These five are the ones actually in play in a home network, and they sit at different layers — which is the thing worth getting straight first.

Standard	Layer	What it does	State
Matter	application	Device model and commissioning, on top of IP.	to study
Thread	network	Low-power IPv6 mesh over 802.15.4.	to study
Zigbee	network + app	The older 802.15.4 mesh — what the Hue lamps speak.	in use
MQTT	transport (broker)	Pub/sub messaging — how Zigbee2MQTT exposes devices.	in use
BLE	link	Short-range pairing and commissioning.	to study

Table 1: The five protocols to study, and what each one is actually responsible for. Matter is the application layer; Thread and Zigbee are the radios underneath it.

Figure 1: Where each protocol sits in the running home setup. The lamps speak Zigbee to a coordinator; Zigbee2MQTT translates that onto an MQTT broker, and the controller on the Pi talks to the broker — never to the radio.

Networking and IoT standards

The wider radio context. The two cellular standards are first on purpose — they are the only items on this board that touch the 5G Systems track, and the cheapest way to meet cellular radio in hardware you actually own.

NB-IoT — narrowband cellular IoT.
LTE-M — the higher-throughput cellular IoT sibling.
IEEE 802.15.4 — the PHY/MAC under both Zigbee and Thread.
IEEE 802.11 — Wi-Fi.

Projects Tracker · Smart Devices · track 3 of 5 ← ReMapping 5G Systems →